Who’s that handsome source mod knocking at your front door? Why, it’s Open Fortress, back home after so long spent fighting in the wars - and he’s bought you a beautiful bouquet of flowers, lovingly marinated in a deadly mixture of gunpowder, human blood and rosemary. That’s right - this bouquet is none other than revision eight of Open Fortress, available for download right now!

Ever since we reopened public downloads for OF earlier in the year, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes, both refining existing content and adding new stuff too. We know you’ve been eager for more content to help make your fragging experience even more enjoyable, and hopefully this new update will provide just that. Although the full patch notes are too long to feature in this blog post, read on for an extended highlight of just some of the features revision eight brings to the table.

We’re kicking things off with the addition of Mercenary Domination, a new team-based variant of Deathmatch that comes with a handful of maps, both completely new ones and ports of existing maps. If you need an idea of how exactly the mode works, it's kind of like collecting a bunch of adorable beanie babies, and when you hit 100 of them you win! Unfortunately one can never experience the joy of collectible bean plushies nowadays, as these little buddies were discontinued 23 years ago to this day. Sad.

Elsewhere we’ve added a new Mercenary Capture The Flag map, Pagoda, which takes the action to the misty mountains of Japan (thanks in part to E-Arkham and Freyja, whose original Japan Pack assets are now included within OF); and there’s a bunch of other new and updated maps too, including a rainy redux of MVM stalwart Mannhattan for Deathmatch. Duke it out in the biggest apple of them all! (Just pay no attention to the mysterious beeping sounds you may or may not hear above the boiler room.)

But these stomping grounds wouldn’t be much good without some fashionable attire to stomp around in - hence why we’ve also added three new Mercenary cosmetic packs for you to equip. Whether it’s a sleuthy detective, a sneaky ninja or an honorable samurai, these getups are the perfect disguises for when the police come asking about the mysterious flower bouquet explosion that just rocked your neighborhood. (Trust us, they can smell that blood-gunpowder-rosemary mix from a mile away.)

Next up, two new announcers have graciously taken time out of their busy schedules to cross over from other planes of existence and yell at you as you make that perfect bodyshot. Hailing from the dusty corrals of Fistful of Frags, the Vigilante has plenty to say about the strange new modern world he’s found himself in, one with just as much violence to go around but not quite as much whiskey to pass. By contrast, Louie Ficknit - the rambunctious robot host of fellow arena shooter Tomb Fetus - is much more attuned to the thrills and spills of Deathmatch, although he’s admittedly used to less blood being spilled and more confetti. You’d better get ready to bumble, because he’s expecting some good bumbles out of all of you!

And there’s much more - bug fixes, animation improvements, new HUD elements, optimized performance, and many other adjustments. We hope you’ll appreciate all the hard work the OF development team has put in, and we also hope to add many more exciting features to the mod going forward. Enjoy the update and stay tuned!